1653224398 War in Ukraine and Chinese lockdowns threaten over the Davos

War in Ukraine and Chinese lockdowns threaten over the Davos summit

Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, in Cologny (Switzerland), May 18, 2022. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, in Cologny (Switzerland), May 18, 2022. JEAN-CHRISTOPHE BOTT / EPA / MAXPPP

On December 20, 2021, the world elite experienced a great disappointment. His favorite annual meeting, scheduled for January 17-20, was severely canceled due to the viral spread of Covid-19 in the Swiss mountains. Klaus Schwab, the indestructible and austere creator of the Davos summit that brought together almost 3,000 big bosses and world leaders in the same alpine location, tried everything to save his event. Death in the soul, he decided to virtualize it. A mighty pike paraded in front of the screens with Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, dressed for the occasion as a defender of international trade and openness to the world.

But it wasn’t Davos. A horror even for the British newspaper Financial Times columnist Henry Mance, who quipped: “No one became a billionaire to attend a webinar by Ursula von der Leyen. » Davos is a necessarily physical social space where we connect and communicate in optimism to solve the ills of the planet. As a place of theorizing a tremendous “simultaneously” where one can simultaneously make a fortune, help the poor, and save the planet.

That’s why smiles quickly returned when Klaus Schwab announced on January 21 that a “real” Davos would be held in the spring. It would take place from May 22nd to 26th.

The atmosphere at the very beginning of 2022 was that of a way out of the crisis. “Despite the current Covid pandemic, over the past decade, world leaders have never been more optimistic about improving economic growth for the coming year,” said PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Consulting’s annual report at the time.

Also read The Davos Economic Forum planned for January has been postponed to early summer 2022

The latter traditionally probes the moods of the big bosses before each summit. And as the icing on the cake, the masters of good humor are these incorrigible French spoilsports. In fact, in January, 85% of them said they had confidence in the development of the economy, a jump of 26 points compared to 2020, unprecedented on the scale of euphoria. “We came out of a major crisis with unexpected situations such as confinement and the shared feeling of a very strong recovery after the event,” testifies Jean-Pierre Clamadieu, President of Engie. Some even spoke of a return to the “glorious 1930s” with the endless pursuit of central bank intervention.

change in monetary policy

Back to earth. On May 22, Davos opens in a completely different atmosphere. The bold consultants from PwC are back with a study that they won’t publish until next week, but whose title is self-explanatory: “Hopes and Fears”. This time, not a soporific sermon from the Chinese President, but a forceful speech from the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to remind us that Europe entered a war it didn’t believe in.

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